Samuel Beckett by William York Tindall, and: Lawrence Durrell by John Unterecker (review)

1966 BOOK REVIEWS 229 SAMUEL BECKETT, by William York Tindall, and LAWRENCE DURRELL, by John Unterecker, Columbia University Press, New York and London, 1964, 48 pp. each. Price $.65 each. (Columbia Essays on Modern Writers, No. 4 and No.6) This Columbia series seems designed to complement Minnesota's flourishing Pamphlets on American Writers with an equally enterprising collection on European writers. Each of the present pair provides, in forty-eight pages, a descriptive and critical survey of the writer's works (to 1964), with bits of biography and a selected bibliography. Each essay, primarily an attempt at elucidation, centers on the main themes and on the relations of themes to styles. On theme and style in Beckett, Professor Tindall uses the words of a character in Beckett's novel, Watt: "The only way one can speak of nothing is to speak of it as if it were something.•.." Later he commits himself a little more specifically: "Weeping Beckett laughs at man in the mess ... the mind confronting an 'inexplicable ' mess is Beckett's theme. His greater works are explorations of the lonely mind." Professor Tindall pays due attention to Beckett's influential theatrical works, showing all they have in common with the novels. Sometimes, in fact, he blurs the distinction, but as often his analysis conveys a sharp sense of the stage effect, especially of Waiting for Godot, Krapp's Last Tape, and Act without Words 1 and II. Moreover, his elucidation of content includes theatrical content; he explains the garbage cans and pots not as technique only, and shows the substantial importance of attitude and stance and physical distortion in the characters, incidentally clarifying Beckett's attraction to pantomime. Though occasionally ponderous in his jokes and definitions, Professor Tindall is also usefully open-minded before his material, and honest in his enjoyment of both the cloacal and the philosophical wit of Beckett. He keeps us looking with him at Beckett's way of making something out of "nothing." And he helps me to understand why Waiting for Godot, boring to read, can be fascinating in the theater. Durrell's three verse plays, on the contrary, are surely more interesting in the study. Professor Unterecker rightly slights them in favor of the novels. With attractive sympathy and intelligent care he traces in Durrell's varied work the themes and their images as they "mark out a clear path for his developing but remarkably consistent point of view," most fully expressed in the Alexandria Quartet. And he offers as useful a guide as one could hope for to the complexities of that pretentious tetralogy. He analyzes only one play, An Irish Fa,ustus (1963), as a kind of "summary" of Durrell's characteristic themes and images. The overlapping points of view, telescoped ironies, symbolic geography-the search for reality through these techniques and symbols, and through plot and character-are shown to work with effective, integrated meaning in the play. And the uses of Marlowe's Faustus, expertly revealed in this analysis, sound effective, too, not contrived. Perhaps the play would even stage well. In any case, this fine study suggests two hopes: that Durrell will leave Einstein for Marlowe, and that John Unterecker will write his book on the plays of Yeats. BERNARD HERINGMAN Baldwin-Wallace College ...